Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  “Several men have through the years said to me: You write like a man. They consider this a compliment. I want to ask: Which man? I never have. Without the answer, I do not feel complimented.”—Harriette Arnow, 1973.

  Arnow’s “which man?” is of course the right question-answer. It is significant that, until recently, this affront was considered unquestionable accolade, for all its inherent assumption of distinctively male and female characteristics and orders of writing—the male, naturally superior.

  *Among these: a different existential sense of life; a different placing of what is important; an opposing vision. Motherhood in the voice of mothers themselves; children. “The sense of wrong.” Fear. Feeling for other women. Sexuality. Truth of one’s body.

  *Jane Cooper’s account in Maps and Windows of the process is searching and complex; especially illuminating the pull toward these forms—so great in our cultural heritage.

  *“Feminism, as I continue to understand it, demands that sex be regarded as irrelevant to merit and ambition,” Ozick explained later that evening, disclosing that she mistook a consummation devoutly to be worked for, for past and present reality.

  **Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  *There is an analogous common expression: the “you’re a real woman” (or “a real man’s woman”).

  **Virginia Woolf, of course. The angel in the house of literature: “My dear, be sympathetic, be tender, flatter, deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. . . .”

  †To be clearly distinguished from the only-beginning-to-be-won right of women to “tell the truth about one’s body.”

  *See footnote page 43. “Ways in which innate human drives and capacities . . . denied development and scope, nevertheless struggle to express themselves and function.”

  **Especially, given prevalent practice, theory, can this be formidable for the analyzed writer-woman; deflecting, blinding, robbing of sources of one’s own authority (that is: basic woman-experience comprehensions, and “motherhood truths” not yet incorporated into literature and other disciplines, let alone into psychiatric theory and practice). Among the too often deferred to: reductive formulas: sex as primary; once suicidal, always suicidal; assignment of certain characteristics, behavior, as innately female; masochism, passivity, “every woman loves a Nazi,” you (women) want to fail, be seduced, raped, punished. Oedipus, Electra. Mother blaming. Guilt where it is not guilt at all but the workings of an intolerable situation. The springs of achievement. Mind-body relationship.

  In addition, there is the danger of fixing to the past; to self-involvement; the distortion of memory; the focus on the personal (most the psycho-sexual); the ignoring of societal roots, causes, effects. All of which diminish, make shallow, falsify one’s writing.

  *”The obstacles are still immensely powerful,” Woolf goes on to say, “and yet they are very difficult to define.”

  ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 42

  *Carolyn Heilbrun might add: “the exploration of experience only through sexuality, which is exactly where men have always told them that such an exploration should take place.”

  OTHER OBSTACLES, BALKS, ENCUMBRANCES IN COMING TO ONE’S OWN VOICE, VISION, CIRCUMFERENCE

  Do not forget:

  The overwhelmingness of the dominant.

  The daily saturation.

  Isolations.

  The knife of the perfectionist attitude.

  The insoluble.

  Economic imperatives.

  How much it takes to become a writer. Bent (far more common than we assume), circumstances, time, development of craft—but beyond that: how much conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one’s right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to come to, cleave to, find the form for one’s own life comprehensions. Difficult for any male not born into a class that breeds such confidence. Almost impossible for a girl, a woman.

  These pressures toward censorship, self-censorship; toward accepting, abiding by entrenched attitudes, thus falsifying one’s own reality, range, vision, truth, voice, are extreme for women writers . . . remain a complex problem for women writing in our time.

  To discuss and define them is, I think, of great value and importance, for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties solved.

  —Virginia Woolf

  Fear

  Fear is a powerful reason; those who are economically dependent have strong reasons for fear. . . . But [even with economic independence] some fear, some ancestral memory prophesying war, still remains, it seems. . . .

  What then can be the nature of the fear that still makes concealment necessary . . . and reduces our boasted freedom to a farce? . . . Again there are three dots; again they represent a gulf—of silence this time, of silence inspired by fear. And since we lack both the courage to explain it and the skill . . .

  —from Woolf’s great Three Guineas

  “And here I must step warily, for already I feel the lash upon my shoulder.”

  —Virginia Woolf

  Fear. How could it be otherwise, as one is also woman.

  The centuries past. The other determining difference—not biology—for woman. Constrictions, coercions, penalties for being female. Enforced. Sometimes physically enforced.

  Reprisals, coercions, penalties for not remaining in what was, is, deemed suitable in her sex.

  The writer-woman is not excepted, because she writes.

  Fear—the need to please, to be safe—in the literary realm too. Founded fear. Power is still in the hands of men. Power of validation, publication, approval, reputation, coercions, penalties.

  “The womanhood emotion.” Fear to hurt.*

  “Liberty is the right not to lie.”

  “What are rights without means?”

  Love

  Of course it is not fear alone.

  Fear—in itself—is assailable. As every revolt against oppressive power throughout the human past testifies.

  There is also—love. The need to love and be loved.

  It has never yet been a world right for love, for those we love, for ourselves, for flowered human life.

  The oppression of women* is like no other form of oppression (class, color—though these have parallels). It is an oppression entangled through with human love, human need, genuine (core) human satisfactions, identifications, fulfillments.

  How to separate out the chains from the bonds, the harms from the value, the truth from the lies.**

  What compounds the personal agony for us, is that portion of the harm which comes to us from the beings we are close to, who are close to us. Their daily part in the balks, lessenings, denials. Which we must daily encounter.

  And counter?

  “The times are not ripe for us,” the times are “not yet.” Except for a privileged few who escape, who benefit from its effects, it remains a maiming sex-class-race world for ourselves, for those we love. The changes that will enable us to live together without harm (“no one’s fullness of being at the cost of another’s”) are as yet only in the making (and we are not only beings seeking to change; changing; we are also that which our past has made us). In such circumstances, taking for one’s best achievement means almost inevitably at the cost of others’ needs.

  (And where there are children. . . . And where there are children. . . .)

  Leechings, balks, encumbrances.

  Harms.

  AND YET THE TREE DID—DOES—BEAR FRUIT.

  *“Whenever a man [appeals to the womanhood emotion] he rouses in her, it is safe to say, a conflict of emotions of a very deep and primitive kind which it is extremely difficult for her to analyze or to reconcile.”

  —Woolf, Three Guineas

  *—which, among all else, results in our being one out of twelve in recognized achievement—

  **Writer, as well as human, task.

  PART THREE

  CREATIVITY; POTENTIALITY. FIRST GENERATION />
  “Silences”—the original talk given in 1962 under the name “Death of the Creative Process”—began:

  “Though I address myself only to silences in literature and the ways in which writing ceases to be, this dying and death of capacity encompasses more than literature, the arts, or even Wordsworth’s ‘widening of the sphere of human sensibility,’ or Thoreau’s ‘to affect the quality of the day: that is the highest art.’

  “At a national conference on Creativity, yes there really was such a gathering, at the University of Michigan several years ago (1959 I believe), they considered (their words) ‘the emerging discovery of the tremendous, unsuspected potentialities in the creativity of man in the meaning of respect for the individual,’ and concluded:

  Creativity was in each one of us as a small child. In children it is universal. Among adults it is nonexistent. The great question is: what has happened to this enormous and universal human capacity? That is the question of the age.

  “Not many would accede to creativity as an enormous and universal human capacity (let alone recognize its extinction as the question of the age). I am one of those who, in almost unbearable, based conviction, believe that it is so.

  “To establish its truth incontrovertibly would require an ending to the age-old denial of enabling circumstances—because of one’s class, color, sex—which has stunted (not extinguished) most of humanity’s creativity. Few of us have been permitted ‘the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.’ ”*

  “Silences” was an attempt, as later were “One Out of Twelve,” “Rebecca Harding Davis,” and now the rest of this book, to expand the too sparse evidence on the relationship between circumstances and creation. (All limited to only one area of recognized human achievement: written literature.)

  There is another undeniable evidence.

  We ourselves (writers, others in the arts, the professions) who are the first in generations of our families and/or sex to become so.

  Our different emergences into literature as circumstances permit. Remember women’s silence of centuries; the silences of most of the rest of humanity. Not until several centuries ago do women writers appear. Sons of working people, a little more than a century ago. Then black writers (1950 was the watershed year). The last decades, more and more writer-mothers. Last of all, women writers, including women of color, of working class origin, perhaps one generation removed; rarest of all, the worker-mother-writer.

  And all, although in increasingly significant numbers, still exceptional: statistically rare.**

  Born a generation earlier, in the circumstances for their class, and/or race, and/or sex, no Chekhov, Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Maxim Gorky, no D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Sean O’Casey, no Franz Kafka, Albert Camus—the list comes long now: say, for a sampling, no A. E. Coppard, Charles Olson, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, etc. etc. etc. etc.

  What they came into by virtue of their birth, we have had to earn at the cost of years and our youth.

  —Anton Chekhov

  However, it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one.

  —Hardy’s Jude the Obscure

  Of the first generation . . .

  A phenomenon of our time, the increasingly significant number of first (or second) generation of our people to aspire to the kinds of uses of capacity possible through the centuries only for few human beings of privilege—among these, to write.

  Marginal. Against complex odds. Exhausting (though exhilarating) achievement.

  This the barest of indications as to vulnerabilities, balks, blights; reasons for lessenings and silencings:*

  The education, most often gotten part-time, over years and with difficulty; seldom full-time for absorption in it. Often inferiority of it. Intimidations.**

  Anxieties, shamings. “Hidden injuries of class.” Prevailing attitudes toward our people as “lower class,” “losers,” (they just didn’t have it); contempt for their lives and the work they do (“the manure theory of social organization” is what W. E. B. Du Bois called it).

  The blood struggle for means: one’s own development so often at the cost of others giving themselves up for us or of our own being able to help our kin. “Love, tenderness, responsibility, would only have meant pain, suffering, defeat, the repetition of my mother’s life for another generation” (Agnes Smedley).

  Likelihood of part-time, part-self writing. Having to support self by means other than writing. Problems of getting to writing at all. Problems of roots; ties, separation.

  Camus’s “loving with despair.” Sense of possibilities not come to; the latent, the unfulfilled, the gargoyled, in our kin.

  Coercions to “pass”; to write with the attitude of, and/or in the manner of, the dominant. Little to validate our different sense of reality, to help raise one’s own truths, voice, against the prevalent.

  Problems of what Chekhov (a first generation) called “squeezing the serf out of one’s soul.”

  Meagerest of indications only.

  Class—problems of first generation—its relationship to works of literature: the great unexamined.

  Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves. It is thus that English literature will survive if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country, if we teach ourselves how to read and how to write, how to preserve, and how to create.

  —Virginia Woolf

  *From the tape transcription.

  **The “only,” the occasional, the tiny handful of exceptions writing before, do not alter these datings.

  *Some of what has been written here of the writer-woman is parallel; clues (and many writer-women are first generation of their families, women or men, to write).

  **Little teaching of writing as process to fortify against measuring one’s earlier work against that of established writers. (No anthology of the work that admired writers were doing their earlier years.) Little reinforcement to the V. Woolf conception that if writing “explains much and tells much” it is valid. Little to rouse confident sense of one’s own source material—the importance of what one has to bring into literature that is not there now, and one’s right to say it.

  SILENCES—II, P. 146

  Excerpts from

  LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS;

  or,

  THE KORL WOMAN

  by Rebecca Harding Davis

  The Atlantic Monthly, April 1861

  A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer’s shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.

  The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,—clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, I think.

  From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and tawny-colored, (la belle rivière!) drags itself sluggi
shly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. . . .

  . . . I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly,—this terrible question which men here have gone mad and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret into words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Hope to come. . . .

  . . . This house is the one where the Wolfes lived. There were the father and son,—both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby & John’s mills for making railroad-iron,—and Deborah, their cousin, a picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was rented then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the cellar-rooms. The old man, like many of the puddlers and feeders of the mills, was Welsh,—had spent half of his life in the Cornish tin-mines. You may pick the Welsh emigrants, Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the windows, any day. They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not so brawny; they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor shout, nor stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. . . . Their lives . . . incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking—God and the distillers only know what; with an occasional night in jail, to atone for some drunken excess. Is that all of their lives?—of the portion given to them and these their duplicates swarming the streets to-day?—nothing beneath?—all? So many a political reformer will tell you,—and many a private reformer, too, who has gone among them with a heart tender with Christ’s charity, and come out outraged, hardened. . . .